Incarnation

It was evening. I was at a Mixtec church celebration, a three day affair where the men had butchered goats and barbecued them overnight in a great fire pit dug in the ground, and the women had dragged sacks of tortillas they had been making for weeks to an outdoor kitchen set up beside the church, from where they served meal after meal of spicy meat and salsa and tortillas. After a day of worship in the church building, the sky was dark over the steep mountains hunched over us. The mothers lay their straw mats on the ground and covered their children with blankets before joining their men around the crackling fire, singing and laughing and talking together. In the morning, they were still visiting, ladling weak coffee from a huge, steaming pot on the fire, blankets thrown over their shoulders to ward off the cold.

It was a glorious church camp-out kind of festival. But it was very different from the next Mixtec festival I would attend where our host and hostess by morning lay passed out drunk and sprawled where they fell until the effects of the moonshine wore off. This church festival had the goodness of shared song and food and celebration without the bane of Mixtec life: abuse of alcohol. On the final day of the festival, however, the guest speaker, a Mixtec man who had moved away and shed his Indian ways long before, taking on Hispanic culture, told them all in a loud Spanish voice, “It’s been lovely, yes, but call me earlier next time when you plan your festival, and I will show you how to do it right!” And this, to me, is Christian mission in a nutshell. On the one hand, it brings to people who have not known Christ a sweet communion among brothers and sisters and a new freedom from the vices that plague their culture, but on the other hand, it exposes them to the ethnocentrism and cultural imperialism of outsiders.

My husband recently attended a conference workshop entitled Why Missions is a Four-Letter-Word. I thought that was a sneaky way to get participants, but it actually evoked a popular conviction that Christian missions is just another form of cultural imperialism and that for people of other faiths to come to ours through our manipulation implies a fundamental self-betrayal. It reminded me of a couple we briefly met in Mexico that worked for MCC. Someone had told them we were from the same part of Canada as they were, so they stopped by our house to meet us. We lived off the beaten track in a remote town, and rarely saw North Americans, so as fellow travelers and workers among the indigenous of the area, we expected a pleasant chat and a comparing of notes about home and work and what had brought us to this corner of Mexico.

The conversation went something like this;
“So what do you do here?”

“We work in such and such villages as development workers helping people put in clay stoves. And what do you do?”

“We work in such and such villages as missionaries talking to people about God.”

At the sound of the four-letter-word missionary, the room chilled, and the faces of our guests froze in shock. I watched as the woman tried to draw words into her mouth. I could see a muscle twitch in her temple as she clenched and unclenched her jaw. She finally spit the words at us as she got up to leave, “How dare you try to change their ancient spirituality.” (She never caught the irony that she was trying to change their ancient way of cooking.)

But there is was. This couple believed that for us to impose our religion on these people who had been worshiping St Mark the rain god for perhaps millenniums was nothing short of treachery, and that for them to convert under our tutelage was nothing short of betrayal of their cultural heritage. And I have to admit. They were right about a good bit of Christian missions. A lot of it is a betrayal. And it isn’t limited to people in the Third World. In a different workshop tackling the topic of dependency, another form of cultural imperialism that stifles local initiative, a participant stood up to describe his experience. He was German. He said that when the American missionaries first came to start the church where he now attended, they had all the answers and imposed their ways on the new congregations, and no one said anything because the Americans held the purse strings. I’m sure the American missionaries would be horrified to know how their generosity was now perceived by their spiritual descendants.

How can our good intent of taking Christ to other people so often go so far wrong? What do we have to offer that is worth the cost to us and the risk to them of going to live among them? We have but one thing to offer: as Paul says, “I have decided that while I was with you I would forget everything except Jesus Christ crucified.” Whatever else we add, no matter how well intentioned, no matter how well it’s worked for us, we will regret. Which of us can leave behind so much?